Ori Director Reveals Why His Next Game Won't Be Published By Xbox

The CEO of Moon Studios, Thomas Mahler, has opened up about why he's decided not to partner with Xbox Game Studios for the developer's next title (non-Ori related), which has previously been described as "an RPG that dares to innovate and go far beyond what the genre has offered players thus far.”

Responding to Phil Spencer's recent comments about why Bungie left Microsoft back in 2007, Mahler explained that the decision to go with Private Division instead of Xbox was (at least in part) due to platform exclusivity reasons.

"We always got so many gamers saying that they love Ori, but hate that they can't play it on PlayStation. Well, why not? Because it was funded by Microsoft, hence they call the shots. Luckily, we got Microsoft to allow us to port Ori to the Nintendo Switch, but that didn't come for free and they probably only allowed it cause the title was small enough to not cause any fuss.

Our next game has a grand vision where we want everyone to be able to play together, across all systems, where Moon owns the platform and the IP and we can steer it into the best direction in order to hopefully make as many people as possible happy without having to tell some of them that they're **** out of luck... cause business."

Mahler also mentioned in his long response over at ResetEra that he felt Xbox wasn't acting accordingly on its idea of having "no artificial walls, no boundaries", most likely due to the fact that "the other parties aren't playing along".

He says he'd ultimately like to see Microsoft "hav[ing] the guts to just go through with their vision" by making their games and porting them to all platforms, setting an example for the games industry in the process.

"Show the industry that that's how you get the most amount of players to play your games. Didn't Minecraft show that that's the right way forward? If they'd do that, I'm sure pretty quickly everyone would follow suit, because usually all these corporations copy what makes the most amount of money... and on top of that, it's the best thing for the players out there."

There's no word on a release window or any major details on Moon Studios' upcoming 3D action-RPG just yet, although it was said to be in early development as of July last year, with the suggestion it was at least a couple of years away at that point. In any case, we know that it'll be a very different experience to the Ori games.

What do you make of the Ori director's comments? Let us know down below.

[source resetera.com]